Did VP Biden Lie About Hearing 2006 Gun Shots?

Last week as Vice President Joe Biden talked publicly about his efforts to assist President Obama with his various gun-banning schemes, he made a startling new claim. He said that while golfing in Pennsylvania in 2006 he personally heard the gunfire from a mass shooting being committed at a nearby school. But did he really? Facts seem to run contrary to Biden’s late claim.

The shooting Biden was referring to occurred at an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006. During the crime, a gunman entered the schoolhouse, killed five children and wounded five others.

Employing his favorite, most overused word–literally–Biden regaled an audience last week about his personal connection to the shooting calling it “pure coincidence.”

On January 17, the Washington Timesreported that Biden made this revelation at a meeting of the U.S. Council of Mayors.

“I happened to be literally–probably, it turned out, to be a quarter of a mile [away] at an outing when I heard gunshots in the woods,” Biden claimed. “We didn’t know… we thought they were hunters.”

Biden continued with the tall tale saying, “As I got back to the clubhouse of this outing and saw helicopters, it was a shooting that had just taken place in a small Amish… school just outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So it’s not just big cities or well-to-do suburbs. It can happen anywhere.”

But is any of this true? Facts seem to cast doubt on the Vice President’s claims.

Firstly, Biden has never mentioned this incident before. This complete lack of his ever mentioning this close connection to the Amish schoolhouse shooting seems out of character. If he was that close to the shooting and with as much as Joe likes to make everything about Joe, it’s hard to believe he would never have mentioned this story before now.

That aside, there’s the physical realities involved in Biden’s claims.

In a follow up report, the Washington Times found that there aren’t any golf courses close enough to the Amish school for golfers to have heard gunshots from so far away.

But a search of maps of the area in Lancaster County, Pa., shows the nearest golf course to the site of the shooting, Moccasin Run Golf Club, is about five miles away. Rodney King, the golf pro at Moccasin Run, said Friday he was working at the course on the day of the shooting and never saw Mr. Biden, who was then a U.S. senator.

At ten miles distant, the only other golf course is even farther away. Both courses are certainly too far away for golfers to have heard gunshots that were fired inside a school building.

Interestingly, a look through last week’s news coverage finds little notice of Biden’s sudden claims conveniently made just as he’s pushing new gun control schemes. One wonders why Joe Biden so often gets away with these tall tales? In light of how VPs Quayle and Cheney were treated by the media, why won’t Old Media operatives ever call Joe Biden on his often times impossible claims?

Warner Todd Huston

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigJournalsim.com and all Breitbart News' other sites, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, and many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs across the country to discuss his opinion editorials and current events as well as appearing on TV networks such as CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and various Chicago-based news programs.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture" which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com.
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